Lighting designer Peggy Eisenhauer, who is partner to lighting designer and Broadway Lighting Master Classes (BLMC) creative consultant Jules Fisher, will present two sessions at this year’s BLMC: Cueing The Musical–Sculpting Time and Rhythm on Wednesday, May 21, and Emoting and Motion: Communicating With Movement on Thursday, May 22.
Wednesday’s session, Cueing The Musical, will focus on both practical and philosophical approach to creating dramatic and musical timing styles specific to every production. “What is time in a dramatic sense in the theatre?” says Eisenhauer of her session. “What makes time dynamic in a dramatic environment? How does music affect ones timing style? What is rhythmic within musical cueing?” Eisenhauer aims to answer these questions, as well as to discuss practice and precision in the digital manipulation of time.
When Eisenhauer returns on Thursday morning for Emoting and Motion, Communicating With Movement, she will present her sense of movement in lighting. “This talk is a discussion that was born of a series of questions that Jules asked me to answer philosophically, about using movement artistically and emotionally in theatre lighting,” she says of her second session. “There are some practical aspects to it, but it’s mainly about the emotion of integrating motion into one’s work. It seemed like a natural level of discussion for designers, which is outside all of the technical aspects of automated lighting, which occupies so much space in everybody’s psyche, about what does what and how it’s done. This is really about why and how one chooses motion, and what can you hope to create with it from the point of view of design.”
The Broadway Lighting Master Classes includes other presentations by leading lighting designers and technicians, including Jules Fisher, Kevin Adams, Christopher Akerlind, Howell Binkley, Beverly Emmons, Donald Holder, Vivien Leone, Brian MacDevitt, and Clifton Taylor, and a special session by projection designer Wendall K. Harringon.
The BLMC will be held May 20 to 22 at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York and includes a ticket to attend Passing Strange on Broadway with lighting design by Kevin Adams. There will also be a special Projection Master Classes component to the BLMC this year, held on Monday, May 19 at the XL LED Lab.